Welcome to our step by step guide for setting up your school contacts within your PrimarySite Website.
In this guide we will cover:
- Importing of contacts via MIS report importing and WONDE Integration
- Manually adding a contact (including staff members)
- Contacts Filtering
- Creating and administrating groups
This document will help you achieve all these things in an easy step by step process. If you have any questions, please get in touch.
Getting Started
To get started, please log in to your school website, go to the ‘Communication’ tab and click ‘Contacts.’
Please remember that the ‘Communication’ tab can only be accessed by a person who has the role of ‘Superuser’ or ‘App Admin’ (for Gold+ customers) assigned to their log-in for the PrimarySite website.
Adding Contacts Through Integration
If your school has MIS integration set-up, you will see the contact details from your MIS in this area. If not, you will need to either add contacts to the system manually (under the manually added contacts tab) or import contacts from your MIS via a .csv or .txt file.
If you would like to integrate your MIS with PrimarySite, please do give us a call on 01636 616 640.
The screen print above shows a school who has our gold plus package, and TheSchoolApp. Should your school not have gold plus, the app access column, app activated column and the manage app access button will not be in place.
Please be aware that our system will go through two updates to pull through data each day.
These updates will start at 9am and 3pm (GMT). This work will not be seen straight away at these times, you will need to check thereafter.
Importing Contacts
Should you not have MIS integration you will need to download your contact data from your MIS
system or populate an excel spreadsheet manually.
Save the data as a .csv file or .txt file
Deletion of Historic Data
Any previously imported data uploaded via a csv or txt file, will need to be deleted prior to uploading a new csv file. This is so that it will not create any duplicates of pupils/contacts. Please note that any manually added contacts will stay the same.
The screen print above shows both manually added and imported contacts; you can distinguish the manually added contacts as it shows ‘M’ next to the pupil name. The pupils added via imported data have no letter associated at the side of the pupil name.
Once you have a csv or txt file saved, you would need to upload it in the pupil contacts area by selecting the Choose File button, locating your file, and then Import. Please remember that any previous data will need to be deleted by this point.
Once your contacts have been imported your pupil contacts will then be listed.
A full instruction guide can be located in the FAQs section of the contact area, this guide relates to the SIMS system only at present.
Adding Contacts Manually
There may be a time when you will need to add a contact manually. You will need to be a Superuser or App Admin of the website to do this. Reasons for adding a contact manually is because anyone that is not a pupil contact will not pull through on an integration update. e.g. Staff members and Governors.
To add a manual contact, you will need to click the ‘Add Contact’ button below.
You can add pupils one by one manually by typing them in on the left-hand side and clicking add to save each pupil. Please note, fields marked with * are mandatory fields.
- Please note that when adding priorities, only Priority 1 contacts will pull through into the booking system and text messages area. ALL priority contacts will pull through into the email system.
Once a contact has been successfully added it will look like this:
If adding staff members, you will need to populate both the contact name and the pupil name field with the same name. Please use the word STAFF in the mandatory Year group field and Class name field. This will help you to easily identify your staff members and will automatically group them together under the STAFF title when selecting your Year group or Class name from your drop-down options within the booking and email system.
Should you add staff members into your contacts it would be worthwhile putting these into a staff member group.
If you manually add a contact that has already been pulled through from your MIS, it will not
overwrite or be overwritten by the same pupils imported via a database.
Contacts Filtering
There is the ability to filter the pupil name in your contacts section by either their year group, class group or you can search by a pupil’s name, a contacts name, an email address or telephone number within the search bar. This allows you to look for a pupil easily within your data.
If you set a filter in place, there is also a button to reset, should you need to use this.
Should there be more than one contact for a pupil, these will all show within this area if you have searched for the pupil, and you will see that there is a telephone icon for the phone number and an envelope icon for the email address associated.
Parents/Carers Not Receiving Communication
Once all your data has been imported and you are ready to send out your communications, you may find that some parents/carers do not receive them. Possible reasons for this could be:
- A pupil contact has a court order against them; this contact will not receive any communication from any PrimarySite systems.
- If the parent/carer or email provider have reported our emails as ‘spam’, this will potentially stop them from receiving any communications from our systems.
- If the recipient email inbox is full, any email communication will not be received.
Please note that any communications already sent by the school will not be received by the recipient after the above has been rectified. You will need to re send them again.
Creating Groups
- Why might a group be created or administered?
There might be several clubs that a school has, a music class, football club, after school club etc. School pupils will form part of these clubs and will need to be added to ‘a group’.
To create a group, you will need to click on the Groups tab and choose a name for the group that you wish to add, e.g. music class.
Select the pupil/s that need adding to the group by ticking the box next to the pupil’s name.
You will have the ability to edit a group once it has been created. To do this, click on the group you have created, and it will appear like the below. You then can tick new pupils or untick a pupil, remembering to click the update button once finished.